Tuesday, April 02, 2002

You can't get good pop music on the air these days because of centralized
conglomerates with monolithic playlists, chosen by payola. So why
can't you hear good classical music? Stephen Budiansky asked
his local classical stations why vocal music and keyboard works had
vanished from their playlists (except perhaps when arranged for
guitar), in favor of tranquil mush by knighted victorians.

The managers of both stations were remarkably
forthright when I posed that question to them. Their answer, simply,
was that they were not really playing classical pieces at all. They
were providing a "sound."

"We don't know for sure how sophisticated our listeners are," Dan
DeVany, the general manager of WETA, told me. "But we do know enormous
amounts about how our radio station is used?we have tremendous amounts
of data on that. And radio is used predominantly as background
listening. That's an important fact, because distinguishing that
experience from the concert-hall experience informs us as to what kind
of music to play."

While insisting that there is no "rigid code" at WETA on what not
to play, DeVany acknowledged that he was influenced by the general
results of industry surveys in which listeners were played various
snippets of music and asked to rate how "positive" or "negative" an
"experience" each was. Vocal music was consistently a big negative. So
was most chamber music. DeVany believes that's because chamber music
"is an extremely intense musical experience." He explained, "In some
cases, when you're doing other things, it demands attention, and that
may become an irritant?just by the nature of the instrumentation."

The public, in short, wants to use a classical station as a kind of
electronic Valium, and the radio stations are giving them what they
want. You might expect public radio stations like WETA to be
relatively immune from this sort of pressure, but as Congress demands
they get more of their funding through corporate sponsorship, they are
increasingly forced into the same mold as the commercial stations,
doing what it takes to get ratings --- a fact which their doctrinaire
critics then use to argue for further cuts in government funding.
(Neat, huh?)

The consequence of this in the limited and regulated radio spectrum
is a kind of Gresham's law of content, where the bad music drives out
the good. (Among other things; to be fair, you also hear fewer
twentieth-century twelve-tone concertos for chalk squeak and rusty
fence, which aren't as obvious a loss). Part of the cure, then, might
be in some form of measured deregulation --- like the low-power
microbroadcasting which the FCC was going to authorize and then withdrew
under pressure from major broadcasters --- including, to its
lasting discredit, NPR.

But it remains the case that for a time, government funding was
helping to keep high-quality oddball stuff, like classical vocal
pieces, on the air --- and to that extent, at least, it was playing a
useful role.